Rush On Rome is a tower defense game that borrows HEAVILY from Kingdom Rush. Unfortunately, not heavily enough.

Gameplay

Rush On Rome is a Roman (obviously) themed tower defense game. At the beginning of each level, you will place your opening towers and hope to hold the enemy off long enough for you to collect the gold you need to buy additional towers and upgrades. The enemies will relentlessly plow their way toward your city, so you will need to choose wisely between upgrading existing towers and placing new ones. As tower defense games go, this is all pretty standard fare, and Rush on Rome doesn't really bring anything new to the table. It's clearly modeled after the classic iOS game, Kingdom Rush (they both have the word Rush in the title so don't mix them up), both in gameplay and graphics. Unfortunately, Rush on Rome cuts a few corners that negatively affect gameplay. Most importantly, the infantry barracks do not allow you to reposition the ground troops that muster. As a result, more often than not, you will place one of these structures at a key intersection and they will idiotically deploy in such a manner as to only engage enemies on one of the paths. This completely negates one of the most interesting aspects of this genre of tower defense games It forces you to ignore efficiency and cleverness and opt instead for simply overwhelming the enemy with superior forces. Second, the upgrades are uninteresting and uninspired more powerful versions of the original Turricula, Tentorium, Vesta, and Catapulta. What's that, you say? You don't know what those things are? Well, neither did I until I experimented. You see, the developers opted for using the original Latin names for these structures, and also failed to provide useful icons or descriptions. Not a huge issue once you are familiar with the units, but poorly conceived nonetheless. If you can get past these issues, there are 15 story missions and 15 challenge missions waiting for you. Rush on Rome does not support Game Center Achievements.

Graphics

The graphics of Rush on Rome are drawn in a lighthearted cartoonish style, which, again, mimics Kingdom Rush mercilessly, but also halfheartedly. The images are extremely low-resolution, and have an almost muddy appearance on my 3rd generation iPad, and the animations are choppy and minimal.

Sound

The music and sound effects don't stand out as being noticeably good or bad. They're just... there.

In-App Purchases (IAPs)

Rush On Rome contains no IAPs of any kind.

Conclusion

Rush On Rome is a hastily thrown together Roman-themed clone of Kingdom Rush. While it is not unheard of for some upstart games to improve on an original in some way, Rush on Rome misses in almost every way, and I can't recommend it.

Upgrades are more expensive, but also more powerful than a brand-new level 1 structure, however, in the early game it is always better to build new rather than upgrade. If you don't have them upgraded by the late game, however, you're going to be in trouble.